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What to Do About a Review You Think Is Fake
Removal is possible, free to attempt, and less likely than you'd hope. Google removes reviews that violate its policies, not reviews that are unfair, wrong, or written by someone having a bad week. The distinction matters, because most of what businesses want removed is the second category.
Here's what actually qualifies, how to dispute it, and why the reply you write matters more than the outcome.
What Google will actually remove
Policy violations, roughly:
| Likely to be removed | Unlikely |
|---|---|
| No actual customer interaction — a competitor, a bot, someone who's never contacted you | An unfair review from a real customer |
| Profanity, harassment, personal attacks | A harsh but accurate account |
| Wrong business — clearly meant for someone else | A one-star with no text |
| Conflict of interest — an employee, a competitor, the owner | A review about price rather than service |
| Off-topic — politics, a rant unrelated to the business | A complaint about something outside your control |
| Spam, duplicates, promotional content | A review from someone your team disputes remembering |
The pattern: Google removes reviews that break rules about who wrote it and how, not reviews you disagree with. "This never happened" is hard to establish and is the most common thing businesses file.
The wrong-business one is worth checking first. It's the most winnable category and it's more common than you'd think — similar names, a franchise, a previous occupant of your address.
How to dispute one
1. Flag it in your Google Business Profile. Find the review, flag as inappropriate, pick the closest policy category. Free, and it takes two minutes.
2. Be specific about the policy, not the unfairness. "This person has never been a customer; we have no record of them and we have checked our system" is a policy argument. "This review is unfair and is hurting our business" is not, however true it is.
3. Wait, then escalate. Automated review takes days. If it's declined and you have a genuine policy case, Google Business Profile support can be contacted for a human look. Persistence occasionally works where the first pass didn't.
4. Set your expectations low. Plenty of legitimate disputes are declined. That's the system, and budgeting emotional energy accordingly is part of running a business with a public profile.
The response is the real work
Whatever happens with the dispute, future readers will see the review. What they will also see is your reply — and they weigh it heavily.
A measured, non-defensive response to a harsh review frequently does more for you than removal would, because it demonstrates something a five-star average can't: that you handle problems like an adult.
What works:
"We're sorry this was your experience. We don't have a record matching this visit, but we'd genuinely like to understand what happened — please call us at [number] and ask for [name]."
What doesn't: arguing the facts, listing what the customer did wrong, hinting they're lying, sarcasm, or a wall of text. Every one of those reads as the business being difficult, which is the exact thing a prospective customer is scanning for.
Healthcare practices have a much harder constraint. Confirming someone is a patient is itself a HIPAA disclosure, and a review response has produced a $50,000 OCR penalty. The rules are here — never reply off the cuff.
What not to do
Don't respond angrily, or the same day if you're angry. Write it, don't post it, look at it tomorrow. The reply that costs businesses most is always written within an hour of reading the review.
Don't ask staff or friends to post positive reviews. Conflict-of-interest reviews violate Google's policy, and a burst of five-star reviews immediately after a negative one is a visible pattern.
Don't buy reviews. Beyond the platform policy, the FTC's rule on consumer reviews addresses fake reviews directly, and enforcement is active.
Don't pay a "review removal" service. What they're selling is the free dispute process, resold — or something that violates platform terms and puts your profile at risk. See the software section's take.
Don't threaten the reviewer. Beyond being a bad idea generally, using threats or intimidation to get a review removed is exactly the kind of review suppression the FTC rule addresses.
The actual defence
Volume. A practice with 300 reviews absorbs an unfair one-star without visible damage. A business with eleven does not — and it's the business with eleven that feels compelled to fight, which makes everything worse.
If a single review can meaningfully hurt you, the real problem is that you don't have enough of them. That's fixable, it's free, and it's entirely within your control: ask every customer, same day, every time. The method is here.
Spend the energy there rather than on the dispute. The dispute is worth two minutes; the review volume is worth a permanent process.
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published September 8, 2026. Nothing here is legal advice.